The Byzantine Empire used to appoint regional Governors who had no family or political ties to the province or region where they were to rule, in order to prevent a local powerbase from being established which might challenge the central political authorities.
The NuLabour Government seems to continuing this practice with the recent shuffling of senior Civil Servants:

Today saw the verdicts on the long running court case in Madrid, where 24 suspected Al Quaeada terrorist cell members were on trial, for membership of a proscribed organisation, and some of them, on charges of helping in the September 11th 2001 attacks (not the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, as most of these people were in custody by then).

The conviction of Andrew Rowe, sentenced to 15 years in prison for the "possession" of items which might be of use to terrorists seems to have echoes of the non-existent "ricin plot", especially in all the dubious "off the record" background details which the news media are adding to their accounts, after the reporting restrictions have been lifted.

Why did it take nearly 2 years for this case to come to court ? What higher priority cases does the UK Judicial system have to deal with than terrorism charges ?

Genuine mistakes can happen in the Police response to the terrorist attacks in July, but there is no excuse for all the the stress and the slur on the character of an innocent man. To be falsely accused of being a terrorist suspect is a very serious slander.

The Guardian has a report about the massive secret marketing database which Tesco, the UK's largest retailer, keeps on its customers, and which it is is apparently hoping to use on everyone else as well.

Their resistance to journalists' requests for their own personal data under the Data Protection Act shows that "they must have something to hide".

Who believes that Tesco etc. will not attempt to collate any National Identity Register numbers which they happen to catch sight of into this vast array of data ?

Tesco is quietly building a profile of you, along with every individual in the country - a map of personality, travel habits, shopping preferences and even how charitable and eco-friendly you are. A subsidiary of the supermarket chain has set up a database, called Crucible, that is collating detailed information on every household in the UK, whether they choose to shop at the retailer or not.

The company refuses to reveal the information it holds, yet Tesco is selling access to this database to other big consumer groups, such as Sky, Orange and Gillette."

The Guardian has a .pdf version of the controvesial Draft Terrorism Bill 2005 online, something which neither the Home Office nor the Parliament websites could be bothered to do on Thursday.

Depressingly, this Home Office seems to be a repeating the same tactics as the controversial Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, i.e. a long and complicated portmanteau Bill, with some very controversial parts, such as the detention without charge extension from 14 days to 3 months, whilst also including masses of complicated new offences, almost all of which are already covered by existing legislation.

It will be intolerable if the Liberal Democrat and Conservative opposition parties get diverted in trying to obtain "concessions" about whether the power of internment without charge should be as long as 3 months or not, and they let through the rest of the clauses, such as the removal of the need for the Home Secretary to personally sign warrants under the Rgulation of Investigatory Powers Act -(delgation not to a Judge, but some faceless bureacrat or other), "on the nod", without proper debate, like they have done in the past.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Who could object to reducing road traffic accident deaths and injuries ?

Why not introduce a European Union wide plan called eCall, the pan-European in-vehicle emergency call system, which would make use of the forthcoming E112 Emergency Services phone numbers, with added Global Positioning Satellite and/or Mobile Phone Location based data, to automatically call the emergemncy services with location information and other data like the license plate number, make and model of the vehicle etc. in the event of a car accident, even if the driver of the vehicle is unconscious, and establish a voice call with an emergency operator if they are not.

Where are the safeguards to prevent abuse of the system, for the vast majority of the time when your vehicle has not been involved in an accident ? The reliance on mobile phone technology means that the devices will have to establish a handshake with the nearest base stations, tracking every vehicle, even if no emergency call is being made.

Although Parliament has not yet come back after the summer recess, this Parliamentary Answer has been published, which shows just how confused and out of its deoth the Home Office is when it comes to new legislation and the Internet:

Mike Penning: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if he will list (a) UK and (b) EU (i) initiatives, (ii) programmes and (iii) laws under discussion concerning improper use of the internet. [16067]

Paul Goggins: The Government have always taken the view that all legislation must be robust enough to deal with offences whether they are committed on or off line. To this end there is a variety of legislation which deals with offences which can be commissioned utilising computer systems and networks, but which contain no specific reference to use of the internet."

So why is the NuLabour Home Office planning to introduce Interent specific legislation regarding terrorist related activities which are already criminal offences under existing draconian, catch all anti-terrorism laws ? Is this yet another case of "We Must Be Seen To Be Doing Something"

Channel 4 TV news is claiming "exclusively" that they have been told that tomorrow will see the publication of the new draft anti-terrorism legislation., which has allegedly got the support of the main Conservative and Liberal Democrat opposition parties.

Channel 4 claim that the Labour Government will be supporting the Association of Chief Police Officers' call for detention without charge or trial to be extended to up to 3 months, from the curremt 14 days maximum under the Terrorism Act 2000.

This was the one issue on which the Liberal Democrats seemed to be worried about, before the summer recess, so if that is being presented, then perhaps all the rest of the controversial ACPO "shopping list" is also to be inflicted on us.

Why is life and liberty threatening anti-terrorism legislation always rushed through Parliament, without proper consideration , scrutiny or public consultation or a referendum ?

We await tomorrow's publication with a sense of fear and dread - the terrorists seem to be winning, by provoking our weak leaders into throwing away the very freedoms and liberties which the terrorists are hoping to destroy.

Right from the start, this section of the paper attempts to blur and confuse exactly what "Data Retention" is, presumably in the hope that the Members of the European Parliament and the public will fail to understand the difference between legal Communications Data Traffic Analysis, of say, mobile phone itemised bills, which are currently available to the authorities, and the proposals to retain such data well beyond the time that they would normally have been deleted or anonymised, in accordance with the necessary principles of Data Protection, which are the law in most European Union countries.

The Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director General of the Security Service MI5, has, unusually, published a speech which she gave to a secret celebration of the 60th anniversary of the foundation of AIVD ("Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst"), the Dutch equivalent of MI5.

The United Kingdom currently holds the revolving office of the Presidency of the European Union.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke and the Home Office has presented a paper to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, outlining some of the dubious Policy Laundering that NuLabour seeks to impose on the 60 million people of the United Kingdom and on the 450 million people of the European Union as a whole.

We will devote a posting to each of the following sections of this paper, as it illustrates just how wrong the balance between liberty and security is, that NuLabour are trying to impose on us, simply to Be Seen To Be Doing Something, and, presumably, as the result of behind the scenes lobbying by vested interests.

Six civil liberties campaigners have been arrested outside a summit of European ministers on Tyneside.
A spokesman for the group NO2ID said two cars were driving towards the venue of the meeting in Gosforth on Thursday when police stopped them.

A Northumbria Police spokeswoman said four men and two women were held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage.

It comes on the second day of the three-day interior ministers' meeting.

About 70 EU ministers were attending the summit where host Home Secretary Charles Clarke was confident of securing a deal with his European counterparts on controversial counter-terrorist measures.

The NO2ID group said they were arrested on Thursday morning on the grounds they may cause a breach of the peace.

The campaigners, who were going to wear orange boiler suits and bar codes on their foreheads, had created a massive ID card to highlight what they see as an increasing restriction on civil liberties.

A spokesman for the group said: "The two cars were approaching the venue when they were stopped and searched under the spurious grounds that there might be a breach of the peace.

'Inquiries continuing'

"Before they could even protest about our civil liberties being eroded they were arrested.

"It is shocking that we could not have a peaceful protest in a peaceful country but this is what these ministers want."

A Northumbria Police spokeswoman said: "Four men and two women have all been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage and are currently in custody.

"Inquiries are on-going."

All of the NO2ID supporters that we have ever met have been entirely peaceful.

To be arrested before they even get to the EU Summit on some dubious "conspiracy to commit criminal damage", charge, is plainly an attempt to supress the democratic right to protest peacefully.

How are six people dressed in orange boiler suits with barcodes printed on their bodies, hoping to attract media attention, any sort of threat to the security of the EU Summit ?

Yhe mainstream media should ask Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who is responsible for the "security" of the EU Summit, about how exactly Civil Liberties are not supposedly being threatened by his misguided proposals outlined in his speech yesterday, and by his Government's curtailment of the right to free speach, and freedom of assembly and peaceful protest.

Using a cross cut shredder to obfuscate the personal details sent to you on junk mail and on utility bills, credit card statements etc. before you throw them away. is excellent advice.

However to conflate such common sense advice against so called "Identity Fraud" (a term which is not covered by any one single criminal offence) with propaganda claiming that the NuLabour ID Card and centralised biometric database scheme is somehow going to have any effect on such fraud, is rubbish, and the Home Office civil servants must be deeply embarassed by it.

It seems that the NuLabour political commissars and spin doctors are at it again, in the run up to the new session of Parliament:

The Department for Education and Skills seems to have been landed with the job of publishing a Consultation on behalf of the NuLabour Nanny State, which seeks to justify the controversial collection and sharing of rumours, suspicions, "soft intelligence" etc. , not just on "Children at Risk" but on all 12 million children in the UK and on their parents or guardians, and which destroys the common law duty of professional advisor/ client confidentiality. Even the Information Commissioner is worried about this scheme.

About this blog

This United Kingdom based blog attempts to draw public attention to, and comments on, some of the current trends in ever cheaper and more widespread surveillance technology being deployed to satisfy the rapacious demand by state and corporate bureaucracies and criminals for your private details, and the technological ignorance of our politicians and civil servants who frame our legal systems.

The hope is that you the readers, will help to insist that strong safeguards for the privacy of the individual are implemented, especially in these times of increased alert over possible terrorist or criminal activity. If the systems which should help to protect us can be easily abused to supress our freedoms, then the terrorists will have won.

We know that there are decent, honest, trustworthy individual politicians, civil servants, law enforcement, intelligence agency personnel and broadcast, print and internet journalists etc., who often feel powerless or trapped in the system. They need the assistance of external, detailed, informed, public scrutiny to help them to resist deliberate or unthinking policies, which erode our freedoms and liberties.

Email & PGP Contact

Please feel free to email your views about this blog, or news about the issues it tries to comment on.

Our PGP public encryption key is available for those correspondents who wish to send us news or information in confidence, and also for those of you who value your privacy, even if you have got nothing to hide.

We wiil use this verifiable public key (the ID is available on several keyservers, twitter etc.) to establish initial contact with whistleblowers and other confidential sources, but will then try to establish other secure, anonymous communications channels, as appropriate.

Current PGP Key ID: 0xE08E882B13FC89C which will expire on 30th September 2015.

You can download a free copy of the PGP encryption software from www.pgpi.org
(available for most of the common computer operating systems, and also in various Open Source versions like GPG)

We look forward to the day when UK Government Legislation, Press Releases and Emails etc. are Digitally Signed so that we can be assured that they are not fakes. Trusting that the digitally signed content makes any sense, is another matter entirely.

Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers and Political Dissidents

Please take the appropriate precautions if you are planning to blow the whistle on shadowy and powerful people in Government or commerce, and their dubious policies. The mainstream media and bloggers also need to take simple precautions to help preserve the anonymity of their sources e.g. see Spy Blog's Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers - or use this easier to remember link: http://ht4w.co.uk

Statewatch - monitoring the state and civil liberties in the European Union

The Policy Laundering Project - attempts by Governments to pretend their repressive surveillance systems, have to be introduced to comply with international agreements, which they themselves have pushed for in the first place

House of Lords - The Law Lords are currently the supreme court in the UK - will be moved to the new Supreme Court in October 2009.

Information Tribunal - deals with appeals under FOIA, DPA both for and against the Information Commissioner

Investigatory Powers Tribunal - deals with complaints about interception and snooping under RIPA - has almost never ruled in favour of a complainant.

Parliamentary Opposition

The incompetent yet authoritarian Labour party have not apologised for their time in Government. They are still not providing any proper Opposition to the current Conservative - Liberal Democrat coalition government, on any freedom or civil liberties or privacy or surveillance issues.

UK Government

Home Office - "Not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope, it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes" - Home Secretary John Reid. 23rd May 2006. Not quite the fount of all evil legislation in the UK, but close.

NIR and ID cards

Stand - email and fax campaign on ID Cards etc. [Now defunct]. The people who supported stand.org.uk have gone on to set up other online tools like WriteToThem.com. The Government's contemptuous dismissal of over 5,000 individual responses via the stand.org website to the Home Office public consultation on Entitlement Cards is one of the factors which later led directly to the formation of the the NO2ID Campaign who have been marshalling cross party opposition to Labour's dreadful National Identity Register compulsory centralised national biometric database and ID Card plans, at the expense of simpler, cheaper, less repressive, more effective, nore secure and more privacy friendly alternative identity schemes.

CommentOnThis.com - comments and links to each paragraph of the Home Office's "Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Scheme".

De-Materialised ID - "The voluntary alternative to material ID cards, A Proposal by David Moss of Business Consultancy Services Ltd (BCSL)" - well researched analysis of the current Home Office scheme, and a potentially viable alternative.

Surveillance Infrastructures

CameraWatch - independent UK CCTV industry lobby group - like us, they also want more regulation of CCTV surveillance systems.

Every Step You Take a documentary about CCTV surveillance in the Uk by Austrian film maker Nino Leitner.

Transport for London an attempt at a technological panopticon - London Congestion Charge, London Low-Emission Zone, Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras, tens of thousands of CCTV cameras on buses, thousands of CCTV cameras on London Underground, realtime road traffic CCTV, Iyster smart cards - all handed over to the Metropolitan Police for "national security" purposes, in real time, in bulk, without any public accountibility, for secret data mining, exempt from even the usual weak protections of the Data Protection Act 1998.

Eeclaim Your DNA from Britain's National DNA Database - model letters and advice on how to have your DNA samples and profiles removed from the National DNA Database,in spite of all of the nureacratic obstacles which try to prevent this, even if you are innocent.

Bloggerheads: The Alisher Usmanov Affair - the rich Uzbek businessman and his shyster lawyers Schillings really made a huge counterproductive error in trying to censor the blogs of Tim Ireland, of all people.

World's First Fascist Democracy - blog with link to a Google map - "This map is an attempt to take a UK wide, geographical view, of both the public and the personal effect of State sponsored fear and distrust as seen through the twisted technological lens of petty officials and would be bureaucrats nationwide."

Panopticon blog - by Timothy Pitt-Payne and Anya Proops. Timothy Pitt-Payne is probably the leading legal expert on the UK's Freedom of Information Act law, often appearing on behlaf of the Information Commissioner's Office at the Information Tribunal.

Georgetown Security Law Brief - group blog by the Georgetown Law Center on National Security and the Law , at Georgtown University, Washington D.C, USA.

Big Brother Watch - well connected with the mainstream media, this is a campaign blog by the TaxPayersAlliance, which thankfully does not seem to have spawned Yet Another Campaign Organisation as many Civil Liberties groups had feared.

Spy on Moseley - "Sparkbrook, Springfield, Washwood Heath and Bordesley Green. An MI5 Intelligence-gathering operation to spy on Muslim communities in Birmingham is taking liberties in every sense" - about 150 ANPR CCTV cameras funded by Home Office via the secretive Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) section of ACPO.

FitWatch blog - keeps an eye on the activities of some of the controversial Police Forward Intelligence Teams, who supposedly only target "known troublemakers" for photo and video surveillance, at otherwise legal, peaceful protests and demonstrations.

Other Links

Free Gary McKinnon - UK citizen facing extradition to the USA for "hacking" over 90 US Military computer systems.

Parliament Protest - information and discussion on peaceful resistance to the arbitrary curtailment of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, in the excessive Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 Designated Area around Parliament Square in London.

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UK Legislation

The United Kingdom suffers from tens of thousands of pages of complicated criminal laws, and thousands of new, often unenforceable criminal offences, which have been created as a "Pretend to be Seen to Be Doing Something" response to tabloid media hype and hysteria, and political social engineering dogmas. These overbroad, catch-all laws, which remove the scope for any judicial appeals process, have been rubber stamped, often without being read, let alone properly understood, by Members of Parliament.

The text of many of these Acts of Parliament are now online, but it is still too difficult for most people, including the police and criminal justice system, to work out the cumulative effect of all the amendments, even for the most serious offences involving national security or terrorism or serious crime.

Foreign Spies / Intelliegence Agencies in the UK

It is not just the UK government which tries to snoop on British companies, organisations and individuals, the rest of the world is constantly trying to do the same, regardless of the mixed efforts of our own UK Intelligence Agencies who are paid to supposedly protect us from them.

Presumably every mainstream media organisation, intelligence agency, serious organised crime or terrorist gang keeps historical copies, so here are some older versions of the London Diplomatic List, for the benefit of web search engine queries, for those people who do not want their visits to appear in the FCO web server logfiles or those whose censored internet feeds block access to UK Government websites.

Campaign Button Links

Gary McKinnon is facing extradition to the USA under the controversial Extradition Act 2003, without any prima facie evidence or charges brought against him in a UK court. Try him here in the UK, under UK law.

FreeFarid.com - Kafkaesque extradition of Farid Hilali under the European Arrest Warrant to Spain

Parliament Protest blog - resistance to the Designated Area restricting peaceful demonstrations or lobbying in the vicinity of Parliament.

The Big Opt Out Campaign - opt out of having your NHS Care Record medical records and personal details stored insecurely on a massive national centralised database.

Tor - the onion routing network - "Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves."

Home Office Watch blog, "a single repository of all the shambolic errors and mistakes made by the British Home Office compiled from Parliamentary Questions, news reports, and tip-offs by the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs team."

Cracking the Black Box - "aims to expose technology that is being used in inappropriate ways. We hope to bring together the insights of experts and whistleblowers to shine a light into the dark recesses of systems that are responsible for causing many of the privacy problems faced by millions of people."